Freitas Branco, Luís de

During his long and varied musical and musicological career, Luís de Freitas Branco (1890–1955) became one of the period’s most recognized and influential figures in Portuguese musical life, active as a composer, music critic and journalist, teacher, musicologist, radio broadcaster and lecturer. Usually regarded by his pupils as the introducer of musical Modernism in Portugal (mainly due to his symphonic poems with their impressionist and expressionist aesthetics), Freitas Branco later became, during the 1920s and 1930s, one of the most motivated musical propagandists of a nationalist New Classicism. His ideas of a classical, balanced and fundamentally rational music (as opposed to musical Romanticism) were disseminated both in writing, published in the Portuguese periodical press, and by the creation of symphonies and other sonata-form music; they appear to have emerged while the composer was closely involved with the founders of a Portuguese monarchist movement, Integralismo Lusitano, and precisely in the composition of the symphonic-poem Viriato